What comes next? The Future Of Project Rap Rabbit

When we first started on Project Rap Rabbit, we knew we were beginning a long and ambitious journey to redefine one of the most creative gaming genres of all. We also understood that our plans weren't small: that original branching songs with lyrics shaped by the players, multiplayer rap battles and multiplatform support would be neither cheap nor easy to develop to the standard that we demanded.

We've always considered ourselves fortunate to have some of the greatest gaming fans and communities on our side, but over the past month we've been more humbled than ever by your support. We've received hundreds of messages, scores of fan art submissions and more social media love and well-wishes than we can possibly keep on top of during our Project Rap Rabbit campaign. To each and every person who has helped and followed our journey, we thank you.

Your excitement for Project Rap Rabbit has been wonderful to behold, but today we must sadly accept that our crowd-funding journey must end here. We knew that sourcing funds for a high-quality rhythm-action game would be tough, and though we knew that Project Rap Rabbit would be an incredible game, unfortunately we weren't able to do enough to prove that to the wider world.

We sadly are not in the position to be able to fund further production for a future crowd-funding relaunch involving a title deeper in development, and wouldn't want to scale back our vision. As a result, work on Project Rap Rabbit cannot continue at this time.

However, you don't make games such as PaRappa The Rapper, Gitaroo Man and Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan without being optimistic in life. To paraphrase one our best-loved creations: "We gotta believe!"

Though our Kickstarter campaign hasn't gone the way we'd intended, our early stages of development have left us more determined than ever to bring Project Rap Rabbit to life. While you didn't see Project Rap Rabbit at any conferences or booths during E3 week, we had a very, very busy E3 filled with meetings about our vision for the future of rhythm-action.

So what happens next? At this moment it's far too early to say, but thanks in part to your overwhelming support we know that our vision for Project Rap Rabbit hasn't gone unnoticed.

From all of us here at iNiS J and NanaOn-Sha, thank you again for your journeying with us. We sincerely hope this isn't the last time you'll hear of Project Rap Rabbit.

Comments

A shame the KS was so botched. Advertising a music game with zero music and zero game to pitch pretty much doomed the project from day one. Hope there's still plenty of fun games on the horizon from all of you.

It is very unfortunate to see this not get funded. I'm not a big fan of rhythm games myself, but I backed this project purely because I wanted to see it happen. I wanted an unique looking game like this become a reality, even if I wasn't going to play it. I do hope this isn't the last time we hear about it. Best of luck to the team!

They're not contradicting themselves since one said the crowdfunding attempt will end here, but that won't stop funding from other places like investors.

Either way, best of luck to whatever may happen! The gameplay footage was fascinating, but as others have said, it was planned to be revealed too late to make a real difference. This campaign must have been planned for months, but it seems it wasn't strategized properly. We gotta believe this project will come into reality, though!

Superbacker

Superbacker

For those saying they're contradicting, they could show a publisher the out pouring of support for the project and get funding, kind of like how Bloodstained had a kickstarter more to show that there was interest and secure a bit of funding.

"We sadly are not in the position to be able to fund further production for a future crowd-funding relaunch involving a title deeper in development, and wouldn't want to scale back our vision. As a result, work on Project Rap Rabbit cannot continue at this time."

"Though our Kickstarter campaign hasn't gone the way we'd intended, our early stages of development have left us more determined than ever to bring Project Rap Rabbit to life. While you didn't see Project Rap Rabbit at any conferences or booths during E3 week, we had a very, very busy E3 filled with meetings about our vision for the future of rhythm-action."

These two paragraphs seem to contradict each other. One implies that the game is canceled. The other implies that there's something in the works to potentially continue development with the aid of some publisher.

Either way, this project was doomed to fail from the start. Whoever was in charge of the campaign failed miserably. You don't launch a video game kickstarter without gameplay footage or a demo unless you are a household name, and post-Mighty No. 9, even that isn't necessarily enough to ensure success. Especially not for a million-dollar campaign.

And that's only one of the significant errors in judgement that were made during the campaign. The other was having community events flying in under the radar, announced hours in advance in the comments section instead of days/weeks in advance in updates. These are very basic things that most people have come to expect from campaigns of this caliber, and when I bemoaned this campaign weeks ago, that's why.

You should've known better.

Matsuura-san, Yano-san, good luck in your future endeavors. I hope we can get a post-mortem on what you think went right and wrong with the campaign, to benefit whoever follows in your footsteps in terms of a campaign for a game of this level.

And to whoever was in charge of this particular campaign: I urge you to read A Crowdfunder’s Strategy Guide: Build a Better Business by Building Community by Jamey Stegmaier before you run another campaign. But only if you actually want to succeed.